Kally Tea

I got this tea from a giveaway by Kally Tea!

First of all – during my email exchange with Kally Tea, they mentioned they experimented with 1 minutes steeps with this tea. I tried it out and love it at the 1 minute mark!

Very interesting tea – the pu’erh is nice and earthy without any fishyness, with a background of tropical flavoring. This tea is very good with sweetener – rock sugar is good, but honey really jived well with the tropical flavoring! I’m thinking I need to try this tea with coconut milk sometime!

Only thing that was sad for me was the resteep wasn’t tropical tasting.

full blog review with pics: http://oolongowl.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/tropical-puerh-from-kally-tea-tea-review/

Cold brew of this one from a few days ago. also a SIPDOWN! since the last little bit i have is off in a swap! See previous tasting notes :)

I had a cold brew of this tonight since i’m not really able to drink much of anything with whatever the heck is going on with my mouth. Once i added some sweetner to this is was good, though the banana part was missing in this brew up of the tea.

Indigobloom picked this one out for our joint purchase and I’m glad she did. Although this is a pretty sour blend, once you add a bit of sweetner, the cherry and banana flavours come out and this is a decent tea. I’ll have to try this hot at some point to see how this goes when hot but i can certainly see drinking this in summer for sure.

Second time around… when I’m not sick… and it’s a bit rosier than I recall, but not by too much.
Lowering the rating a tiny bit because while it tastes great, somehow it was better before. More soothing. I just got home from my intro to tea exam so I’m a bit wiped. Forgive my shoddy review!
Anyhow, I’m glad to have this in my cupboard. Sil, don’t be too afraid!! :)

Second time around… when I’m not sick… and it’s a bit rosier than I recall, but not by too much.
Lowering the rating a tiny bit because while it tastes great, somehow it was better before. More soothing. I just got home from my intro to tea exam so I’m a bit wiped. Forgive my shoddy review!
Anyhow, I’m glad to have this in my cupboard. Sil, don’t be too afraid!! :)

You know, this is not bad!! From the scent, I expected something overwhelmingly floral and not fruity at all. Yeah, it IS floral, but in a rather light, unassuming kindof way. The Cherry part is even milder, meshing seamlessly with the floral part.
Now that it’s cooled, my cup is super refreshing. I think I’ll save a bunch for summer so that I can make it iced!
(bear in mind, I AM flu-ridden so there is a chance I’m missing some notes)

I won this when Kally Tea ran their last contest! I have been not enthused by the last few flavored blacks I’ve tried, however, this was OH SO YUMMY! You can see the shaved almond slices in the tea, and it brewed into a delicious medium body black tea with a nice brisk base and definite almond flavor. I added a bit of honey to enhance the natural honey flavor and sipped on it all morning.

Well, I funny story with this one. I actually had this tea few days before Nicole kindly sent some to me (thank so much!) except it was called Tealux ‘Honey Pistachio Biscotti’. So it’s the same blend with different sellers and different names. I could tell right away by the name, the look of the tea, and the descriptions of the ingredients. haha. I find both blends are missing the promised pistachios! I don’t see any in the picture of the Kally, but I do see one right in the forefront of the Tealux! Maybe they float to the bottom of the bag. (Some nice pistachio blends are SpecialTeas Vienna Winter Green and Fusion’s Pistachio Lime Mate, Butiki’s Pistachio Ice Cream). So I can’t really say much more about this one that I didn’t say about the Tealux. Both are mild flavored black teas that are sweet tasting, with yummy looking almonds. I’m not sure how much it tastes like biscotti. But it’s pretty good. It has a bit of a drying mouth affect though. BOTH blends have misleading descriptions… it seems more like almonds and coconut to me rather than pistachios and biscotti. So I wonder if all of Kally’s teas are the same as Tealux’s or if they have multiple different sources? I’ve seen another almond tea that has more than a few brands with the same blend. I’ve got two of them (Teavana and American Tea Room) and I just saw another one yesterday. Who are the original blenders and why don’t THEY sell their own blends? It’s interesting!

ETA: I shook up the Tealux two ounce upside down thinking the pistachios would float to the opening where I could see them when I opened the bag. Nope. No pistachios.

Mmmmm! To be honest I was a little nervous about purchasing a watermelon flavored tea. It’s one of those things where you like the actual fruit/flavor of so much you are afraid to find out you don’t like it as a tea.

However, even with my fear I decided to go and try some of Kally Tea’s Wild Watermelon since it was at such a good price. I’ve never purchased anything from Kally Tea, but I can tell you from this one experience I will be making some future purchases.

Getting to the point, yes I would buy this tea again. It has a very nice “watermelony” flavor. I added a little bit of honey and it made it that much better.

Before I even began steeping this tea I had to take a nice sniff in the bag…lol (that sounds odd I know). And having a cold I was still able to smell the sweetness. I’m pretty sure it is because of my cold, but it took me a little bit to really smell the watermelon in there. At first it smelled like a cool aid powder, very sweet and fruity, but soon I was able to smell the watermelon coming through.

I like this tea a lot because I feel it tastes like it is supposed to. It’s not overly sweet, and it actually tastes like a good watermelon.

Hibiscus! wow is it ever present. I think next time I need to make sure there is less in my spoon. But… other than that, I am really enjoying this cup!
The banana and cherry work together wonderfully. Unfortunately, it’s also a case of steeping longer to get the fruity flavour I want, or steeping for less time to minimize the sour hibby. That is, if picking it out doesn’t work. It isn’t exceptionally sour, as I can still taste the other aspects quite clearly.
Either way, this will be gone all too soon. Thank you Kally for screwing up and sending us free tea! :P

sipdown!

Cold brew of this one and it hasn’t changed my mind. While this isn’t a bad tea, its not really a tea that has a decisive flavour. Really not much else to say about it but bon voyage!

I’m not sure how i feel about this tea yet. I have to repeatedly say, Kally Tea has excellent customer service. I had a really negative experience the other day and it just reinforced how much i apprecite those companies that take the time to think about their customers even when problems are minor. :)

So on with the tea… i really picked this one to try cold brewed as i thought it might be an interesting iced tea – i tend to really enjoy fruity iced teas. this one is like a tea that can’t make up it’s mind. am i lime? am i pear? am i blackberry? the result isn’t so much a random “berry” flavour..but a flavour that changes as you drink it. There’s a taste in there that this reminds me of…but i haven’t been able to place it yet. I’m hoping i’ll figure it out before i finish drinking it all. Overall an “interesting tea.”

Backlog.

Ahh. I see I also didn’t like this previously. Might toss it, in that case. Just not a pleasant combo, and I think there’s rooibos in here… just ick.

Ehhhh…. definite ginger flavour, mixed with…. weirdness. As Raritea mentioned, it’s also a bit perfumey. Bleccch. Probably not a tea I will end up finishing :/ I don’t think I can make this better. For someone who loves ginger, this one could be ok, or perhaps be mixed with another tea, but…. it’s not for me!

Not as good as it used to be, but the sweet tangerine flavour I enjoyed in it is still present, just muted. Spice not really obvious, though I can’t remember if it ever was.

Made this for a travel mug again because I’m an idiot. Same thing as last time – no flavour after it sat for a while. Oops. Will try not to do it again.

I still think this one tastes like sour cherry. I have no idea why. But I adore it for that. However, either the travel mug killed the deliciousness, or it sat too long (killing the deliciousness). So, next time I must remember to drink it more quickly after brewing.

Yep, I still feel like this tea tastes like spiced sour cherries! Anyhow, it is delicious. I hot-brewed and chilled a large cup of it last night and drank it super fast when I got home today. And it was awesome. Not a lot of flavour on the sip, but wonderful aftertaste. A great sub for cold water.

Yummers. As expected, this works great in a travel mug. Too bad my sense of taste is currently marred by the leftover fish I just ate for lunch (seasoned with onion powder, chili powder, etc. etc.), which is lingering rather badly, haha.

Ok…. this smells like something SO familiar, but I can’t place it. But I love it! Argh, hopefully it will come to me…. (Perhaps it’s some citrusy drink?)

Anyhow… this is delicious. Not a flavour I’ve encountered prior in tea, but man, this is freaking delicious! And with a nice white tea finish at the end. Ack, I need more!

ETA: So! I triumphantly return to Steepster to inform you all that this tea, this tangerine spice tea, tastes bang on like some sort of sour cherry concoction that I have previously tasted. Perhaps sour cherry pie filling that my mom made. To be honest, I haven’t quite sorted that part out yet, but it’s crazy that it tastes like that! A re-steep in half the water was also enjoyable (and the leaves retained aroma after this, but I threw them out anyways, bad bad bad.)

Nuts! I thought this was a sipdown, since I usually have separate entries for tea from different sources, but apparently not. Sigh. On the plus side, I did finish off what was in a baggie; the remainder is in a lovely tin that belongs to Indigobloom, and it has retained much more flavour, so will be rather enjoyable to finish off. Although… there are probably a few travel mugs’ worth left in there, haha. Anyhow, much more caramelly and toasty this time. Quite good.

Green rooibos blend? I didn’t think so…. weird. Anyways, sadly, this has definitely lost some of its flavour since I first had it, so it’s mostly a weak cup of slightly caramelly water. Still drinkable, but I know it used to be better. I believe I have some more in a tin from Indigobloom – maybe that half has fared a bit better. This should be headed for a sipdown shortly, I hope.

Threw this in a travel mug this morning; it’s ok, but not amazing. I probably underleafed and/or brewed it incorrectly. It was a last-minute grab, when I couldn’t find a straight black that I wanted (didn’t want to use up a whole packet of Anxi Fo Shou black or something, couldn’t find Laoshan Black…. urgh my room is a tea disaster).